here are many
grounds for opposing the movement, social, humanitarian and other. We
are here concerned with it only as it is an attack on purity. From the
Christian point of view the marriage relation has for its end the
procreation of children for the upbuilding of the Kingdom of God. If
circumstances are such, through reasons of health or economy, that
children seem undesirable, the remedy is plain, self control. The theory
that human beings have no more control over their appetites than beasts,
while it has much to support it in contemporary life, cannot be admitted
from the point of view of religion. Self-control is always possible, and
is constantly exercised by many men and women who choose to be guided by
principle rather than by passion. And in any case the Christian Religion
can become no partner, not even a silent one, in a conspiracy to murder,
or in the sort of compromise that turns marriage into a licensed sodomy.
If indeed the economic status of the modern world is such that the
average couple cannot support a family, then the Christian Church may
well aid in the bringing about of an economic revolution; but it can
hardly aid in the destruction of its own ideals of purity.

What is ultimately at stake in the modern world is the whole conception
of purity as a quality that is desirable. This attitude has become
possible among us for one reason because we have consented to the
suppression of ideals of life which were calculated to sustain it. To
sustain any moral or spiritual conception there must be maintained
certain appropriate ideals which, while out of the reach of the average
man, create and sustain in him an admiration and respect for the ideal
standard. So the standard of purity presented in Mary and protected by
the belief in her Immaculate Conception and her assumption, has the
effect, not only of commending the life of chastity in the sense of the
vows of religion, but also in the broad sense of the restraint and
discipline of appetite whether within or without the marriage relation.
It impresses upon us the truth that purity is not only a human quality
but a divinely created virtue, the result of the infusion of sanctifying
grace into the soul. Is it not largely because the young are taught
(when they are taught anything at all in the premises) that purity is a
matter of the _will_, that they so often fail? If they were taught the
nature of the _virtue_ and were led to rely more on the indwelling